h it. They had some sandwiches and coffee at
the hairdresser's expense, and went home in a cab: while the chaperon had
breakfast with the officer of noble family.

The American girl has succeeded in freeing European social intercourse
from many of its hide-bound conventions. There is still much work for
her to do. But I have faith in her.

CHAPTER XV

Music and the Savage.

I never visit a music-hall without reflecting concerning the great future
there must be before the human race.

How young we are, how very young! And think of all we have done! Man is
still a mere boy. He has only just within the last half-century been put
into trousers. Two thousand years ago he wore long clothes--the Grecian
robe, the Roman toga. Then followed the Little Lord Fauntleroy period,
when he went about dressed in a velvet suit with lace collar and cuffs,
and had his hair curled for him. The late lamented Queen Victoria put
him into trousers. What a wonderful little man he will be when he is
grown up!

A clergyman friend of mine told me of a German _Kurhaus_ to which he was
sent for his sins and his health. It was a resort, for some reason,
specially patronized by the more elderly section of the higher English
middle class. Bishops were there, suffering from fatty degeneration of
the heart caused by too close application to study; ancient spinsters of
good family subject to spasms; gouty retired generals. Can anybody tell
me how many men in the British Army go to a general? Somebody once
assured me it was five thousand, but that is absurd, on the face of it.
The British Army, in that case, would have to be counted by millions.
There are a goodish few American colonels still knocking about. The
American colonel is still to be met with here and there by the curious
traveller, but compared with the retired British general he is an extinct
species. In Cheltenham and Brighton and other favoured towns there are
streets of nothing but retired British generals--squares of retired
British generals--whole crescents of British generals. Abroad there are
_pensions_ with a special scale of charges for British generals. In
Switzerland there has even been talk of reserving railway compartments
"For British Generals Only." In Germany, when you do not say distinctly
and emphatically on being introduced that you are not a British general,
you are assumed, as a matter of course, to be a British general. During
the Boer W